Techmeme
August 20, 2021, 4:00 PM

Top News

Josh Horwitz / Reuters:
China passes a data privacy law mandating that data collection has a reasonable purpose, user consent, and limited to “minimum scope”, taking effect November 1  —  China's National People's Congress on Friday passed a law designed to protect online user data privacy and will implement …
Noel Titheradge / BBC:
Internal documents show OnlyFans moderators can give multiple warnings to successful accounts posting illegal content before closing them  —  Internal documents, leaked to BBC News, reveal that OnlyFans allows moderators to give multiple warnings to accounts that post illegal content …
Lucas Shaw / Bloomberg:
Emily Flitter / New York Times:
Washington Post:
Researchers who built an Apple-like system to identify CSAM in e2e encrypted online services, say they abandoned it due to numerous abuse and misuse concerns  —  Jonathan Mayer is an assistant professor of computer science and public affairs at Princeton University.
Mike Peterson / AppleInsider:
Report: Google is dismantling its Health division, formed in 2018, and scattering its units across the company  —  Google is reportedly dismantling its health technology initiative and splitting its projects across other teams as the chief of the division departs the company.
Mark Gurman / Bloomberg:
Internal memo: Apple is delaying its return to corporate offices from October until January at the earliest because of surging COVID-19 cases and new variants  —  - Company pushes back return from October, encourages vaccines  — Apple doesn't plan to close stores, offices on rising cases
Catalin Cimpanu / The Record:
Cloudflare says it mitigated a 17.2M rps DDoS attack last month, ~3x larger than any previous DDoS attack, targeting a customer in the financial industry  —  Internet infrastructure company Cloudflare disclosed today that it mitigated the largest volumetric distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that was recorded to date.
Eric Newcomer / Newcomer:
Chris Sacca on his move to climate investing, Jack Dorsey's inability to confront big questions, and Travis Kalanick's weakness in managing company culture  —  A conversation with Chris Sacca about climate investing — and Travis Kalanick.  —  Chris Sacca apologized for joining our Zoom call a few minutes late.
April Glaser / NBC News:
Facebook rolls out new security features for people in Afghanistan, including a one-click tool to quickly lock accounts and limit account discoverability  —  Facebook said Thursday it is rolling out new user controls for people in Afghanistan who are rushing to delete their digital footprints …
Kate Beioley / Financial Times:
Sean O'Kane / The Verge:
Elon Musk says Tesla is working on a humanoid robot that will handle “tasks that are unsafe, repetitive or boring”, with a prototype “sometime next year”  —  A prototype is supposedly coming ‘sometime next year’  —  Tesla CEO Elon Musk says his company is working …
Chris Welch / The Verge:
Court docs: Google's “Premier Device Program” gave Android OEMs a greater share of Search revenue for not preinstalling third-party app stores on their devices  —  Android OEMs couldn't preload apps that could install other apps  —  Newly unredacted sections of Epic's antitrust complaint …
Chaim Gartenberg / The Verge:

Sponsor Posts

Subquadratic:
Subquadratic: the LLM built for 12M-token reasoning  —  SubQ can reason across entire codebases and document sets in one pass with no RAG workarounds.  Read how SubQ 1.1 Small holds near-perfect retrieval out to 12M tokens.
Cloudflare:
Cloudflare Connect 2026: The Agentic Conference  —  Stop preparing for agents.  Start running them.  100+ sessions, workshops, and speakers from OpenAI, Arm, and Cloudflare across AI, security, and performance.
Zoho:
Get UAE eInvoicing ready with Zoho  —  The UAE announced its eInvoicing mandate on 30 October 2024, when the Ministry of Finance issued Federal Decree-Laws No. 16 and 17 of 2024, laying the legal groundwork for a national eInvoicing system.
IDrive:
Protecting your Cloud Applications Data  —  Backing up Office 365, Google Workspace, Dropbox & Salesforce data is critical to preventing data loss or corruption, complying with laws and avoiding critical downtime in case of a disaster.

Featured Podcasts

Sources:
Marc Benioff on the AI boom, SaaSpocalypse, and future of Slack
Candid conversations with the leaders shaping what's next in AI and the broader tech industry. Hosted by Alex Heath, who has covered Silicon Valley for more than a decade.
Subscribe to Sources.
Invest Like the Best:
Gabe Stengel - Building Investing Superintelligence
The leading destination to learn about business and investing. We do this by showcasing exceptional talent and ideas.
Subscribe to Invest Like the Best.
Grit:
Inside the AI Startup Making Customer Support 65% Cheaper
Grit explores what it takes to create, build and scale world-class organizations.
Subscribe to Grit.
Lenny's Podcast:
90 minutes of unfiltered product advice from Snap and Discord's product chief | Peter Sellis
Interviews with world-class product leaders and growth experts to uncover actionable advice to help you build, launch, and grow your own product.
Subscribe to Lenny's Podcast.
Big Technology Podcast:
AI Doom Backlash Arrives, Anthropic & OpenAI IPO Outlook, Frontier Business Momentum Slows
The Big Technology Podcast takes you behind the scenes in the tech world featuring interviews with plugged-in insiders and outside agitators.
Subscribe to Big Technology Podcast.
Channels with Peter Kafka:
AI Wants to Shop for You. What Could Go Wrong?
Media and tech aren't just intersecting - they're fully intertwined. To understand how those worlds work, Peter Kafka talks to industry leaders, upstarts and observers.
Subscribe to Channels with Peter Kafka.
 

About This Page

This is a Techmeme archive page. It shows how the site appeared at 4:00 PM ET, August 20, 2021.

The most current version of the site as always is available at our home page. To view an earlier snapshot click here and then modify the date indicated.

More News

Joe Pinsker / The Atlantic:

Earlier Picks

Lauren Feiner / CNBC:
Alex Heath / The Verge: